What Others Are Saying:
When a Greenland shaman decides to fight back against global warming and the harm it is doing to his people, a powerful series of events unfolds in this cli-fi thriller. Keith Rommel knows how to spin a great yarn!
– Dan Bloom, The Cli-Fi Report

About the Book:HUNGER WILL BRING ANYTHING TO THE SURFACE …
The Eskimo people of Greenland have grown tired of the damage being done to their country. Global warming from emissions that stem from the shipping lanes that run between Canada and Greenland has made people that live close to the coast sick. Cancer, asthma and as many as 5,000 deaths a year have been attributed to this pollution. A single cargo ship in one year burns more emissions than 50 million gasoline burning vehicles.

When Akutak, a Greenlandic Shaman Eskimo, decides to take action against the things that are destroying his country, he uses the ancient arts and creates a tupilak and with it and conjures a curse. Designed in the form of an octopus, this Goliath is going to become Greenland’s guardian and do everything within its power to stop the erosion of the ice sheet.

But not everyone sees the Tupilak Octopus as a champion and they seek to destroy it. But the only way to destroy it is to conjure something more powerful and Akutak may be Greenland’s most powerful shaman.

This novelette is part of the Cli-Fi movement and contains stunning facts surrounding Greenland and the danger this beautiful country faces from big oil to overused shipping lanes. Akutak and his Tupilak Octopus has one message: leave Greenland alone! – Read this highly educational novel with a great fiction story intertwined within the startling facts.

Excerpt:
Akutak knelt down on the hard, cold surface of a mountainous ice sheet that overlooked the valley’s deep ice canyon. A large rivulet carried fast-moving glacial water, and the sound of the running river was loud enough to reach Akutak even at this altitude.

Located in the interior of Greenland, beneath the ice sheet and river flow, was a canyon that snaked around and reached the Petermann Glacier on the northern coast. The water melt also flowed beneath the ice and was released into the Arctic Ocean.

True to old tradition almost lost throughout the centuries, Akutak wore the skins of animals that were captured for their meat. The skins were sewn together by his wife. She was a skilled seamstress and made him kamiks, trousers and anoraks, gloves and a hat. It was her skill that protected him against the harsh elements and kept him alive. Knowing she made the clothing, the frigid cold was of no concern; in Greenland it is said a man is what his wife makes him.

Opening the flap of an animal skin sack that was slung over his shoulder, he peered inside and saw what he had placed there before he left home at first light.

The wind whipped and reminded Akutak that where he was was inhospitable and unwelcoming. But still, he continued to move forward with the plan that took him nearly two years to complete; shrouded in silence even to his kin. What he created and what he was about to do was never shared with anyone else. It couldn’t be because that was the way.

He carefully reached into his sack and pulled out a hand-sized tupilaq. This carefully handmade avenging monster was created to keep people away from his native land, which was shrinking each year because of global warming.

The shaman began to chant in his native tongue of Inuit. He called forth in a repeated rhythmic sound, reciting his desire to make those who caused it to pay for what his country was suffering. He wanted to instill fear and summoned a beast, large and unstoppable, filled with the rage of his ancestors. This beast would do terrible things to keep people away from Greenland.

He looked at the tupilaq, made the traditional way to ensure its effectiveness; the design represented exactly what he foresaw as being the bringer of fear and order, death, and a reluctance to challenge the waters around Greenland. Made from carved bone, dried and stretched skin, woven hair and sinew, the totem even contained parts from dead children.

Drawing himself close to the ridge, each footfall carefully placed so as not to plunge to his death, his chant continued as he looked over the edge and into the clear water. He held onto the tupilaq, looked at his work one last time to make sure it was good enough, and then held it out and released it over the flowing water.

About the Author:
Keith Rommel is the author of numerous fiction thrillers, best known for his Thanatology Series, which includes The Cursed Man, and The Lurking Man, both of which are becoming Hollywood movies. Keith is also a screenwriter.

[An interview with Dan Bloom about his informal “Cli-Fi Ruminations” at @clifi on Twitter and Who They Are Intended For]

INTRO:

On Twitter, Cli-fi theorist Dan Bloom has shared many of his cli-fi musings, and compiled a list of them to share with other people — mostly intended, he says, for potential or would-be cli-fi novelists, academics studying the emergence of the genre, reporters researching news story about the rising genre and of course, current cli-fi writers themselves. And, he points out, readers of cli-fi, too.

You can find his list of some of his cli-fi thoughts on a blog here. We recently asked Bloom, who is not a novelist or a literary critic, why he sat down to write these thoughts down and how he did it, and who he had in mind when he wrote them down. He was kind enough to reply in a few emails to explain his zen-like ”cli-fi ruminations.”

QUESTION: So, Dan, what’s this all about? You’re not an academic, you don’t have a PhD, you’re not a literary theorist or a literary critic or a novelist, so what were you driving at in writing these thoughts down? And how did you do it?

DAN BLOOM: I wanted to gather my thoughts about what direction I felt cli-fi is going in, should go in, might go in in the future, and its philosophical and literary meanings. So using the 140 chararacter limit of the usual Twitter post, in order to keep my thoughts concise and brief — and readable, without being verbose — I sat down on my bed in my spare time, and lying on my back with my head propped up on a pillow, I merely jotted down on my cellphone screen shorts Tweets either late at night or early in the morning. I was just thinking to myself, and thought the ideas might be useful to writers, critics, academics, literary theorists, PhD scholars, book reviewers and readers.

QUESTION: And what do you hope the publication of these ideas might do?

DAN BLOOM: I wrote them down with no real purpose or intention, other than to try my hand at putting my thoughts down on paper (on screen, that is) and to see if anybody out there in readerland or writerland or academia or the literary criticism or book reviewer world might find some of the “cli-fi ruminations” useful or food for thought. That’s all. I mostly wrote them down for myself, though, to think out loud to myself and for myself, and to try to clarify in my own mind what cli-fi is all about now and might be about in the future. I really didn’t have any real purpose in mind, just to use the Twitter format to keep things neat and concise. And, I found out, as I began writing them down, about ten or twelve at every sitting, that the ideas were interesting and provocative to me, if nobody else. So I found the exercise, the thought experiment, useful for me, first of all. If anyone else gets anything out of them, great. I really just wanted to experiment with a short concise form to write down some ideas I have about the direction of cli-fi and its future.

QUESTION: So, then, which ones did you like best and which ones didn’t you like so much, after you wrote them down?

DAN BLOOM: Good question. In fact, I wrote them all down, without thinking of which ones “worked” or which ones didn’t. I just wanted to make a record and then see later on if it added up to anything. So yes, some of the ruminations work very well, and some don’t work as well, too, and I decided in the end, that in fact, it’s up to each reader to decide which of these ruminnations work for them, and which ones don’t. I didn’t edit myself, and I just let the thoughts come out, almost like writing poetry. The ideas just came out of my mind as I began typing. I am now writing about ten a day, and I plan to compile 100 or 500 or 1000 eventually. But I will be happy to reach 100.

QUESTION: Can you give us some examples of which ones you like best?

DAN BLOOM: Well, I like them all, of course, They are just a record of my thoughts as I jotted them down. But on looking at them later, I do see that some of them are more positive and inspiritng and even motivational than some of the others, which might seem dystopian or apocalyptic to other people. So I feel that it’s up to each reader to take the ruminations and check off the ones they like and the ones they don’t like so much. To five you an example, below I will mark in BLUE those ruminations I like best because I feel they might be useful to literary critics and writers and readers who want to understand what cli-fi is. And every reader will have different choices. I think that is what is most interesting about this thought exercise. Everyone will have different reactions. So here they are:

​• Cli-fi isn’t a marketing term or a bookstore shelving category, and it’s more than a literary term. It’s a password into the future and those who know it, know.

​Cli-fi is more than a genre term, much more than that: it’s a code word, a password, a secret handshake; it is bringing us together as one

​ Cli-Fi is not for you or your children or grandkids, no. It’s codeword for future generations, as yet unborn. And born they shall be. In next 30 generations.​

Cli-Fi cannot, will not, save us from what’s coming. Too late for that. But it’s here, now, always. We have 30 generations to prepare. See?

In the future, come 30 more generations of man, there will be no Cli-Fi. By 2500 A.D. (Anthrocenus Deflexus) it will be too late.

People want cli-fi to offer solutions, comfortable happy fixes. Aint gonna happen. We are ”doomed, doomed” as a species, and we did it to ourselves.

​• Cli-Fi cannot, will not, save us from what’s coming. Too late for that. But it’s here, now, always. We have 30 generations to prepare. There’s time.

​• Cli-fi won’t make much of a difference either way you define it. It’s just here, now, beckoning future writers. It’s not sci-fi, never was

Cli-fi is more than a mere genre: it’s a cri de coeur, a warning flare, a pathway to the future before it’s too late. See? #CliFi’s here now​

If the rising new literary term “cli-fi” makes you ‘cringe’ at first sight or hearing, don’t give up on it yet. With time, you will come to see it for what it is.

​ Cli-fi is not sci-fi, it is not eco-fiction, it is not subgenred to anything earlier. #CliFi is a hashtag burning its stamp into our very skin, as we prepare.

​Cli-fi is more than a genre term, much more than that: it’s a code word, a password, a secret handshake; it is bringing us together as one.

Cli-fi wasn’t just a case of slapping a new name on an old genre. It’s much deeper and existential than that. Think game-changer, new directions.

We’ll never make it out of here alive. That’s cli-fi in a nutshell. Man the lifeboats, prepare to test the seas of one season after the next.

Cli-fi defines a line the sands of time that no man can cross without trepidation or reverence. There’s a reason we are here. What is it?

If cli-fi is one thing, it’s a chance to choose our future. One door leads here, another door leads there. Choose wisely: Your descendants are waiting.

There’s a tragic flaw in our genes, a selfish shellfish that doesn’t want to share. This DNA will be our downfall. This Earth shall abide.

Cli-fi doesn’t choose sides. We do. Choose your weapon, use it wisely. We are here by the grace of God, and someday we won’t be. God knows.

You could say that in a post-sci-fi world, cli-fi has come to rescue us from oblivion. Not true. No way.

You might not really be interested in cli-fi, or where it is going. But trust me, cli-fi is interested in you. Why? Becos the End is nigh

When all is said and done, cli-fi points in only one direction. It’s for everyone to find it on their own. ON THE BEACH from 1957 has clues.

Cli-fi is not about who coined it or who popularized it. It’s about much more pressing things, like how many more generations before the End?

I never met a future I didn’t like. No, that can’t be true. Some futures spell the end of humankind. It’s in the cards. Choose your exit.

Cli-fi is neither pro nor con. It just is. Take your pick. Choose yr sides. We are at war w/ a future that threatens all futures. Arise!

Cli-fi is so much a part of this world that on first hearing the word or seeing it in print, it slips right by, invisble, unnoticed.

If by some remote chance you find yourself reading a cli-fi novel without realizing it’s cli-fi, you have arrived.

There are are still 30 generations to be born before the real apocalypse begins. This now is just a rehearsal. An audition.

Cli-fi leads to a meeting of the minds, borderless, rudderless, unconsolable. Will we get there on time?

If you think time is running out, or has already run out, in terms of the unspeakable cli-fi future we face, you are very close to solving the riddle. Why are we here?

I don’t want to sound pessimistic, as optimism must abound and console us. But listen to the wind, hear the chimes sing, ring.

Cli-fi has a place in our hearts and minds, now and forever. But forever is no longer forever. We sold the farm.

Cli-fi can, and will, shine a light on the darkness that is about to befall us. Let’s stick together and shoulder the burden.

You didn’t know cli-fi was coming. Nobody did. It’s taken us by surprise.

There will be days when cli-fi is beyond us, unscoutable, undetected. All the more reason to pay attention.

Cli-fi doesn’t mean resignation or giving in to the darkness ahead. To the contrary, it means taking up arms.

If a time shall come when all else fails, cli-fi may just come to the rescue. Make room.

Cli-fi cannot answer all our questions or undo the deeds we have done. No. But she can unburden us of our fears.

There will come a time when there is no time left. That’s where, and when, cli-fi comes in.

Who will write the cli-fi of the future? They will be legion, legends. Welcome them.

Cli-fi is more than a mere genre term, much more than a literary term. It’s a battle cry, a cri decoeur, a shout-out to future generations: “We tried to warn you!”

Climate change is more than a fact of life. It is the result of human ingenuity, greed, rapaciousness and fear. Fear not: cli-fi is here. Write it.

I came to the table naive and unquestioning. I left totally convinced there will be dead people, lots of dead people. That was the genesis of cli-fi.

You might not want to go down the cli-fi road, and that’s okay. It’s not a pretty picture, not a happy selfie. It’s disaster, writ large.

In the long and rambling history of humankind, cli-fi will be just a blip on the radar screen. Pay it no heed.

You weren’t born yesterday. Your descendants may not even be born at all, ever. That’s how unfathomable cli-fi is.

If you can manage to fit the personal stories of cli-fi between the covers of a book, do it. With trepidation. Know your audience.

Cli-fi will have no denouement, no act three, no happy ending, no Greek chorus, no social media take-away. Push send.

Sorry, but this is how cli-fi is going to be, in the Anthropocene. Just 12 letters spelling doom.

I wish there was some cli-fi way out of here, but there ain’t. Ain’t ain’t ain’t. Ain’t ain’t ain’t times, ten thousand times ain’t.

QUESTION: So in the end, what were you driving at?

DAN BLOOM: You know, as this all unfolded, I had no idea what I was doing, nor did I want to know what I was doing. I just did it. They came to me, when I made in the evenings or in the early mornings. I hope they will prove useful to some people — maybe cli-fi novelists working now or in the future with the genre, or maybe readers or literary critics or academics writing papers about cli-fi for academic or research journals. I amost feel like this was a kind of automatic writing. I just wrote down what was in my mind, and one idea led to another, one by one. But not all of them “work.” But I will let others decide for themselves which ones work and which ones don’t. For them. For me, they all work. I was just sitting in bed jotting things down to myself.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Sunbury Press has released The Heatstroke Line, Edward ‘s L Rubin’s first novel, a Cli-Fi thriller set in the near future.

‘Edward Rubin has temporarily exchanged his academic cap for a novelist’s hat and has written a powerful cli-fi novel set in the near future.

”He knows that “Mad Max,” “The Hunger Games,” “Waterworld,” “The Walking Dead,” and innumerable other books, movies and TV series attract large audiences by portraying a future where society has been devastated by war, disease, environmental calamity or supernatural disaster. Such post-apocalyptic tales constitute an important and widely-popular genre.

”As a novelist, Rubin wants to place his own cli-fi footprint in the sands of time and hopes that his book will serve as a kind of warning flare for readers now and in the future.” — Dan Bloom, The Cli-Fi Report

EXCERPT:
Daniel Danten didn’t really want to have a family. What he wanted was to be a scientist, to teach at a university and produce original research. But this seemed so unlikely, given the state of things in Mountain America, that he decided to hedge his bets or he’d have nothing to show for his life. So he married a woman he convinced himself he was in love with and had three children. As it turned out, somewhat to his own surprise, he achieved his original goal, probably because he switched fields from astronomy to entomology, a subject of enormous practical concern these days. And now, with a secure position at one of Mountain America’s leading universities, his own lab, and a substantial list of publications to his credit, he spent most of his time worrying about his family. His wife, Garenika, was depressed, his ten year old son Michael was suffering from one of the many mysterious ailments that were appearing without warning or explanation, and his fourteen year old daughter Senly was hooked on Phantasie and running wild. Worst of all, his sixteen year old, Joshua, who had always been such a reliable, level-headed and generally gratifying son, had become an American Patriot.

On a blazing, early September afternoon, with the outdoor temperature spiking at 130 degrees Fahrenheit, he was sitting with Garenika in the waiting room at Denver Diagnostic Clinic while Michael was being examined by still one more doctor. Garenika thought they would get some sort of answer this time, but Dan was convinced that the doctor would come out of the examining room and say that she really couldn’t tell them what the problem is. Senly was spending a rare evening at home and Joshua was just returning from his field trip to the Enamel, an expedition that, Dan felt sure, was designed to make the participants angry, rather than providing them with information. The doctor appeared and Garenika jumped to her feet.

“Well,” the doctor said, “I really can’t tell you what the problem is.”

“Why not?” Garenika asked, her voice tinged with its increasingly frequent sense of panic. “Why can’t you find an answer for us? Look at him—he’s losing weight, his skin keeps getting blotchier, and he’s exhausted all the time.”

“I’m sorry. As you probably know, we’re pretty sure that we’re seeing all these new diseases because the climate change has wiped out a lot of the beneficial bacteria that we used to have in our bodies. Commensals, they’re called. But we’ve never really figured out how they work, so it’s hard to compensate for their disappearance.”

“Okay,” said Dan. “So what can we do for Michael?”

“Keep him comfortable and give it time. Put cold compresses on any area where there’s a rash. Try to get him to eat, lots of small meals if he can’t tolerate a large one. We’re expecting some new medicines from Canada that may relieve the symptoms. Michael’s getting dressed; he’ll be out a few minutes.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Edward Rubin is Professor of Law and Political Science at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. He is the author of ​ an academic book titled​ “Soul, Self, and Society: The New Morality and the Modern State.”
​. ​
”The Heatstroke Line” is his first novel. For more information, see ​his website at www.edwardrubin.com.

Sunbury Press has released “Polar City Dreaming:How Climate Change Might Usher In The Age Of Polar Cities” by Stephan Malone. Danny Bloom contributed the introduction. Artist Victoria Goodman created the cover artwork.

About the book:
Stephan Malone has written a book that, if you read it carefully, will change your life and the way you look at the future. Read it in that spirit, and remember that life in so-called “polar cities”arrayed around the shores of an ice-free Arctic Ocean in a greenhouse-warmed world is coming down the road in the distant future.

Not now, not yet. But soon. A hundred years? Three hundred years? Five hundred years. ”Soon!” (scare quotes mine). James Lovelock, who in 1972 conceived of Earth’s crust, climate and veneer of life as a unified self-sustaining entity, Gaia, foresees humanity in full pole-bound retreat within the next 500 to 1,000 years as areas around the tropics roast — a scenario far outside even the worst-case projections of climate scientists. Lovelock is serious, I am serious and Stephan Malone’s book is serious, too. Read it and weep for humankind. But also read it as a guide to taking action so that this nightmare scenario never has to happen.

In 2007, I began setting Web sites showing designs by Taiwanese artist Deng Cheng-hong for self-sufficient Arctic communities. My intent was to conduct mere a ”thought experiment” that might prod people out of their comfort zones on climate — which remains, for many, even today, a someday, somewhere issue. “At six going on eight billion people,” Lovelock told the New York Times in an interview in 2006, “the idea of any further development is almost obscene. We’ve got to learn how to retreat from the world that we’re in. Planning a good retreat is always a good measure of generalship.” The retreat, Lovelock insisted, even then, would be toward the poles. Enter the concept of “polar cities” for survivors of global warming and climate chaos in some far distant future, at least 30 generations from now, if not more. Of course, it sounds like a dubious scenario, But there is already an intensifying push to develop Arctic resources and test shipping routes that could soon become practical should the floating sea ice in the Arctic routinely vanish in future summers.

Sensing this shift, the U.S. Coast Guard has already proposed establishing its first permanent Arctic presence, a helicopter station in Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost town in the United States. It’s not a stretch to think of Barrow as a hub for expanding commercial fishing and trade through the Bering Strait. The strategic significance of an ”opening Arctic” recently was described in an article by Scott Borgerson, a former Coast Guard officer who is now a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations. “It is no longer a matter of if, but when, the Arctic Ocean will open to regular marine transportation and exploration of its lucrative natural-resource deposits,” he wrote. While he didn’t mention polar cities per se, it’s not a stretch to imagine where they will first be situated. Mr. Malone’s book is paving the way humans will see the future — and polar life.

As humans are driven to Arctic shores by climate calamity at lower latitudes over the next thousand years — perhaps sooner! –it’s a sure bet that the far north will be an ever busier place. Urban planners, get out your mukluks. Readers, use this far-seeing book as a home resource to help you to envision what life might very well be like for our ancestors, far far down “the road.” –Danny Bloom